In April, the Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting was awarded to the Associated Press for a series of articles it published about the New York Police Department’s “clandestine spying program that monitored daily life in Muslim communities.” The AP’s assertions were so extensive that they filled more than 50 separate pieces, the first published in August of last year. Its reporters alleged that since the attacks of September 11, the New York City Police Department’s Intelligence Division had placed entire Muslim communities under scrutiny with “no evidence of wrongdoing.” The department, they wrote, had infiltrated mosques and Muslim student groups with no legal basis to do so. It had operated far outside its geographical jurisdiction and had cast too wide a net when monitoring and analyzing American Muslims.

The NYPD had joined the CIA in an “unprecedented partnership,” blurring the line between foreign and domestic intelligence-gathering, and had operated in secrecy with “scant oversight.” It had run afoul of legal constraints, especially a series of limitations on its intelligence-gathering to which the NYPD itself had agreed following a court case in 1985. It had violated civil-liberties rules in a way that would not be permitted of federal institutions. And after all this misbehavior, the results were mixed in any case.

The articles were quickly and widely disseminated and elicited expressions of deep outrage among Muslim Americans and civil-liberties activists. They created fissures between the police and the communities it sought to protect, undermined confidence in the NYPD, and attracted national attention—which, according to the AP’s Pulitzer citation, “result[ed] in congressional calls for a federal investigation and a debate over the proper role of domestic intelligence-gathering.” As well they should have. A free citizenry relies on a free press to uncover civil-liberties abuses.

But any serious discussion about the alleged methods and practices of the NYPD Intelligence Division should have begun with one question: Was the AP’s investigation accurate?

The answer is no.

The articles misrepresent the scope, purpose, and rationale behind many of the NYPD Intelligence Division’s programs. They confuse events and policies in ways that are misleading and cast the tale they are telling in the worst possible light. I know all this to be true, because I worked directly for the deputy commissioner of the Intelligence Division for the last seven years, first as a special assistant and then, for the last four years, until May 2012, as his director of intelligence analysis, overseeing all the city’s terrorism investigations.

Nonetheless, the articles were accepted as gospel—perhaps because the accuracy of the work was beside the point. They were celebrated precisely for what they alleged, not what they proved. Their purpose was not to foster serious debate about NYPD anti-terrorism activities, and there has been no such serious debate in their wake.

The legal and policy questions surrounding how to safeguard civil liberties while defending society from acts of terrorism are certainly complex. There is, inevitably, a difficult balance we must strike between security and liberty, and it demands rigorous and ongoing debate about American anti-terrorist methods. Rather than raising these issues in a thoughtful way to inspire reasoned discussion, however, the series of articles made broad allegations and cherry-picked and misconstrued examples to support particularly damaging charges.

This article is intended to restore the context, accuracy, and critical detail left out by the AP and thereby convey the truth of what is an honorable and successful story of sustained, life-saving police work in a climate of unprecedented threat. It is impossible to respond to every AP allegation and distortion even in this generous space. I will therefore focus on the three subjects that have dominated headlines about alleged NYPD misconduct since the articles were published: first, a supposed human-mapping program run by the department; second, counterterrorism efforts outside New York City; and third, actions involving universities. In honing in on these hot-button issues, I will also refute a number of attendant accusations about the ethics and efficacy of NYPD methods.

But first, some background on the evolution of the Intelligence Division and its strategy.

On February 26, 1993, a massive car bomb was detonated below the North Tower of the World Trade Center. The 1,336-pound device was intended to knock the North Tower into the South Tower, bringing both down and killing thousands. The plot failed but still killed six people and injured 1,042 more.

Although the suspects were dismissed as incompetent, their associates were already plotting another attack. The extremist cleric Omar Abdel Rahman, also known as the Blind Sheikh, was at the heart of this follow-up plan to attack the United Nations, the Lincoln and Holland tunnels, the George Washington Bridge, and the FBI’s New York office. That so-called Landmarks Plot was thwarted by an informant who had infiltrated the group.

Almost all the participants in both plots were ultimately arrested, tried, and brought to justice, and that temporarily closed the case for most Americans. But on the morning of September 11, 2001, Islamist terrorism crashed back into New York City when 19 al-Qaeda members hijacked four commercial passenger airliners and rammed two of them into the World Trade Center, killing 2,749 people and completing the mission begun in 1993.

Having been attacked twice successfully in the span of eight years, the city could no longer completely defer the responsibility of counterterrorism to the federal government, determined Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly. While the NYPD was prepared to work with the federal agencies, the department determined it would have to make systemic and autonomous changes in how to protect the city from further attacks.

To meet that challenge, in January 2002, the NYPD became the first police department in the country to develop its own Counterterrorism Bureau. The new mayor, Michael Bloomberg, and Commissioner Kelly appointed Marine Corps Lieutenant General Frank Libutti to run it. To head a restructured Intelligence Division, the department recruited David Cohen, a 35-year veteran of the CIA who had led both the operational and analytical branches of the agency.

This was no mere cosmetic relabeling or shuffling of the bureaucratic deck. The department increased its representation on the FBI-led Joint Terrorism Task Force from 17 detectives to 120. It reassigned fluent speakers of Arabic, Pashto, Farsi, and Urdu to counterterrorism duties. And it posted senior officers in 11 cities around the world to build relationships with local police agencies and visit the scenes of terrorist attacks abroad.

The NYPD also incorporated a crucial civilian component to fight terrorism. A corps of expert analysts in foreign affairs, intelligence, and counterterrorism were recruited from top graduate schools as well as from the intelligence community inside the Beltway. These well-trained and well-educated civilians were tasked with studying evolving methods of attack and terrorist hot spots around the world.

Additionally, the department cast a wide net for collaboration, working with law-enforcement agencies throughout the northeast and mid-Atlantic and partnering with 11,000 members of the region’s private-security industry through a program called NYPD Shield.

Preventing another 9/11 meant studying the attacks of 1993 and 2001 and the thwarted Landmarks Plot. The 1993 attack and the plot were local affairs, planned by groups of regionally based conspirators, six of whom originated from the Palestinian territories, Egypt, and Kuwait. The men lived in New York City and New Jersey, and the sites of their radicalization included the Al Kifah Refugee Center and Al Farouq Mosque, both on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn, and the Al Salam Mosque in Jersey City. These mosques were in thrall to the Blind Sheikh.

The 9/11 attack was carried out by men from Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, and Lebanon. They had been trained overseas before blending into the population of the United States. At least six of them chose to live in Paterson, New Jersey, specifically because there was “an Arabic-speaking community there,” as the 9/11 Commission Report says. Vitally, in the Landmarks Plot (the only one against New York that was derailed during this eight-year period) a confidential informant who was able to penetrate the conspiracy was the critical factor in detecting and disrupting the plan before it became an attack.

These trends meant that the department had to figure out how to (a) find individuals from abroad who had buried themselves in local communities and (b) utilize human intelligence (confidential informants) to penetrate conspiracies before they came to fruition.

If the task wasn’t challenging enough, the NYPD also had to contend with a piece of legal architecture known as the Handschu Guidelines, a binding agreement overseen by a federal judge following the settlement of a lawsuit in 1985. No other police department in the country is bound by these rules, which at the time stipulated in part that police were not allowed to investigate political activity before having specific knowledge of criminal activity. After 9/11, the department was understandably concerned that prohibitions in the guidelines might interfere with its ability to prevent terrorist attacks. As a result, in 2002, the NYPD proposed to a federal court that the terms of the guidelines be modified; the court agreed.

The modified guidelines begin by stating a general principle: “In its effort to anticipate or prevent unlawful activity, including terrorist acts, the NYPD must, at times, initiate investigations in advance of unlawful conduct.” Clearly, conducting an investigation following a successful attack, as was done in 1993 or 2001, was no longer acceptable. Plots had to be disrupted before they went operational.

The new Handschu rules also state: “The NYPD is authorized to visit any place and attend any event that is open to the public” and “to conduct online search activity and to access online sites and forums on the same terms…as members of the public.” The department is further authorized to “prepare general reports and assessments…for purposes of strategic or operational planning.” It is therefore entirely legal for the Police Department to search online, visit public places, or map neighborhoods.

I.

The Demographics Unit

The AP Claim: The NYPD has engaged in a “human-mapping” program without citing any evidence of wrongdoing. This program has placed entire Muslim communities under scrutiny.

For some, the very act of gathering intelligence is an illegitimate use of police power. But to find and stop terrorists, the Police Department uses many of the same methods that are used to arrest drug dealers, human traffickers, and gang leaders. Detectives develop detailed information about the nature of the crime and the people involved. While tips from the public are useful, the police cannot rely on them exclusively to detect terrorism conspiracies.

In 2003, with that in mind, the Intelligence Division created the Demographics Unit. Its mission was to identify “venues of radicalization” or “hot spots” in order to detect and disrupt terrorist plots in their beginning stages. The unit was also charged with identifying the locations in certain communities where foreign operatives might hope to lie low, just as the 9/11 hijackers did in Paterson, New Jersey. Given the rich diversity of the ethnic and cultural landscape of New York City, officers in the unit were specifically chosen for their unique language capabilities and cultural knowledge. Individuals were matched to geographic areas where they would be best able to distinguish the benign from the threatening. Proud to be Americans and members of the NYPD, the majority of these officers were Muslims.

A September 22, 2011, AP article paints a frightening portrait of the Demographics Unit and the work it did: “The New York Police Department put American citizens under surveillance and scrutinized where they ate, prayed, and worked, not because of charges of wrongdoing but because of their ethnicity, according to interviews and documents obtained by the Associated Press,” runs the article’s opening paragraph. “The documents describe in extraordinary detail a secret program intended to catalog life inside Muslim neighborhoods as people immigrated, got jobs, became citizens, and started businesses. The documents undercut the NYPD’s claim that its officers only follow leads when investigating terrorism.”

But this police-state nightmare bears no resemblance to the nuanced work of the Demographics Unit. The unit employed what is called a risk-basis model. In the three Islamist plots against New York between 1993 and 2001, the vast majority of the conspirators were from a limited group of countries: Egypt, Kuwait, Lebanon, the Palestinian territories, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Yemen. The risk-basis model would therefore indicate that these countries could be deemed “higher risk” or “of concern” in relationship to terrorism.

A similar risk-based model is exactly what the Transportation Safety Agency (TSA) recently adopted in the wake of a different terrorist plot—that of the 2009 Christmas Day Bomber, who failed to bring down a plane above Detroit only because he couldn’t ignite the explosive device concealed in his underwear. The TSA made a list of “countries of concern,” and now passengers from those 14 states face additional scrutiny, such as pat-downs and having their carry-on luggage examined under the new rules. (There is a great deal of overlap between the countries on the TSA list, developed by the Department of Homeland Security and the State Department, and those states the NYPD has considered “countries of concern.”)

Plainclothes officers of the Demographics Unit were deployed for this mission. They went into neighborhoods that had heavy concentrations of populations from the “countries of interest” and walked around, purchased a cup of tea or coffee, had lunch and observed the individuals in the public establishments they entered. This is an important point: Only public locations were visited. Doing so was perfectly within the purview of the NYPD, for, as the Handschu Guidelines say: “The NYPD is authorized to visit any place and attend any event that is open to the public.”

Here’s what they did not do: Plainclothes officers did not conduct blanket ongoing surveillance of communities. Not only is that an impossible task, but it also would have been inefficient and had a low likelihood of identifying terrorist plots in their early stages. At its largest, during a brief period after the July 7, 2005, attacks in London, the unit had 16 officers—hardly enough to monitor a neighborhood, much less whole communities. Officers would take a first pass to familiarize themselves with luncheonettes, dollar stores, and other legitimate businesses and record what they saw. They would be very unlikely to return unless there was reason to believe that a location might be a “venue of radicalization.”

How did the AP treat this? Its writers claimed that “the department has dispatched teams of undercover officers, known as ‘rakers,’ into minority neighborhoods as part of a human-mapping program, according to officials directly involved in the program.” As mentioned above, individuals involved were not undercover officers. Undercover officers are provided with fake identities and misrepresent who they are. Plainclothes officers of the Demographics Unit carried no false identification and did not purport to be anyone in particular. This was a blatant error on the part of the AP. In addition, the AP claimed, “Police have also used informants, known as ‘mosque crawlers,’ to monitor sermons, even when there’s no evidence of wrongdoing.” As a matter of Police Department policy, undercover officers and confidential informants do not enter a mosque unless they are following up on a lead vetted under the terms of the Handschu Guidelines. The AP’s description of “mosque crawlers” roving from mosque to mosque without express legal permission to enter that location is pure fiction.

Still, there was the collection of information, and that is really what troubled people. So why cover social and recreational sites to begin with? The answer: Radicalization frequently occurs in nontraditional locations, not only religious centers. One of the key findings of the 2004 attack on a Madrid train station (inspired by al-Qaeda) and the 2005 attack on the London Underground (committed by al-Qaeda) was that the plotters had not radicalized in mosques. In Spain, different members of the terrorist cluster were radicalized in a barbershop, an apartment, and an unidentified store where some “watched videos containing images of exercises in training camps, as well as images that exalted the value of the jihad,” according to court testimony. In the U.K., the venues of the radicalization of the 7/7 bombers included the Iqra Learning Center bookstore and the “al-Qaeda gym” (the Hamara Healthy Living Centre), both in Beeston.

The AP articles claimed that the NYPD “kept files on individuals” gathered by the Demographics Unit. This is a significant distortion of reality. Yes, to be sure, observation reports were prepared. Naturally, such reports included the names of store owners and customers and the information gleaned from conversations. However, no files about particular individuals were created. The Word-document reports and area-familiarization summaries about visits to public locations were kept on the shelf so that they might be accessed in the event of a fast-moving plot. It would give the department a head start on geographically based knowledge, including data about venues of radicalization and potential “flophouses” or other locations where operatives from specific countries might seek to conceal themselves.

For example, the Demographics Unit was critical in identifying the Islamic Books and Tapes bookstore in Brooklyn as a venue for radicalization. Information the unit collected about the storeprovided a predicate for an investigation that thwarted a 2004 plot against the Herald Square subway station. The unit also played a role in forming the initiation of an investigation that led to the 2008 identification ofAbdel Hameed Shehadeh, a New Yorker who was arrested and is currently facing federal charges for allegedly lying about his plans to travel to Afghanistan in order to kill U.S. servicemen. Both operations were conducted in accordance with the Handschu Guidelines.

Anyone who suggests that the efforts of this unit (which was renamed the Zone Assessment Unit in September 2010) did not comport with legal rules either has not read the Handschu Guidelines, has misunderstood them, or has willfully overlooked their meaning. The AP’s reporters and editors were in one of these categories. Anyone who denies the success of the demographics initiative is fortunate not to carry the burden of responsibility should there actually be a counterterrorism failure resulting in an attack. I, for one, would have borne that responsibility. The AP team would not have.

II.

Outside City Limits

The AP Claim: The NYPD’s Intelligence Division operates far outside its geographical jurisdiction without the knowledge of local agencies.

If vast oceans and international borders cannot hinder terror plots against the United States, invisible lines separating states and counties certainly cannot. The 1993 attack on the World Trade Center was launched from Jersey City. The 2005 attack on the London Underground was launched from Leeds, 180 miles north of the capital. More recently, Faisal Shahzad’s 2010 plot to explode a bomb in an SUV in Times Square on a summer Saturday night on behalf of the Pakistani Taliban was launched from Bridgeport, Connecticut.

It is perfectly legal for the NYPD to travel beyond the boundaries of New York City to investigate cases or visit commercial establishments where terrorists might be radicalizing. Similarly, it is legal to obtain information outside of New York that the Intelligence Division may use “to prepare general reports and assessments concerning terrorism and other unlawful activities or the purposes of strategic or operational planning.”

In order to help its partner agencies better understand their own jurisdictions, the Demographics Unit was deployed on select occasions to jurisdictions in New Jersey and Long Island. This led the AP to determine that “the NYPD operates far outside its borders and targets ethnic communities in ways that would run afoul of civil-liberties rules if practiced by the federal government.” What’s more, according to the August 23 article, “it does so with unprecedented help from the CIA in a partnership that has blurred the bright line between foreign and domestic spying.”

The notion of the NYPD as a rolling team of rogue spies would be comically preposterous if it weren’t so damaging. First, the NYPD is not the federal government. Second, these operations were not unilateral. Local agencies were involved. Any reports or assessments were shared with the local police agencies. What local police chose to tell or not to tell the politicians in their areas was beyond the NYPD’s purview.

As the New Jersey Star-Ledger reported on March 6, 2012:

Although recent disclosures that in 2007 the New York Police Department spied on Muslims in New Jersey have unleashed a furor, interviews with a dozen former state and federal officials show the department’s presence was widely known among the state’s law enforcement officials. In fact, it seems that after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, almost everyone—including Gov. Chris Christie, who was U.S. Attorney for New Jersey at the time—knew to varying degrees the NYPD was scouring the state, where some of the hijackings were planned and one was launched.

A different initiative included the selective use of undercover officers and confidential informants outside city limits. As with the investigation of the 1993 plot against the World Trade Center, which refused to be limited to one side of the Hudson River, a number of terrorist investigations that began inside city limits bled over into adjacent jurisdictions. Any such investigative activity involving human sources had to be conducted in strict accordance with the Handschu Guidelines, just as if those investigations were limited to New York City.

NYPD efforts beyond city limits led to the arrests of the New Jersey–based Mohamed Alessa and Carlos Almonte at John F. Kennedy Airport in June 2010. They were headed to Somalia to join the terrorist organization al Shabaab. Their apprehension marked the conclusion of a three-and-a-half-year investigation by the FBI and Joint Terrorism Task Forces in New York and New Jersey. Also involved: the New Jersey Office of Homeland Security and Preparedness and the U.S. Attorney’s office in Newark. The case against Alessa and Almonte was developed through the careful work of an NYPD undercover officer who made contact with the men in 2009 and became a trusted confidant in northern New Jersey.

Similarly, the investigation that led to the arrest of Jose Pimentel began with an investigation in New York City and moved upstate to the Albany region. In November 2011, Pimentel was one hour away from completing the construction of a pipe bomb intended for detonation in New York City when he was nabbed by police. The department’s intelligence program was built to facilitate exactly the kind of regional collaboration that made his detention possible.

One AP headline blared, “NYPD’s spying programs yielded only mixed results.” Strictly speaking, “mixed results” is accurate in that for the programs to have yielded non-mixed results, they would have been 100 percent successful or 100 percent unsuccessful. But the implication of the headline is that results have been disappointing. The record of just one aspect of these initiatives tells a dramatically different story. Read on.

III.

On Campus

The AP Claim:TheNYPD has investigated and infiltrated Muslim student groups without any legal basis to do so.

At universities students are expected to explore new ideas, challenge themselves, and engage in robust debate involving multiple dissenting opinions. The NYPD has been especially sensitive in any operational work that risks infringing on this protected space. Allegations that police have been infiltrating Muslim student groups at colleges in the city and schools beyond city limits, including Yale and the University of Pennsylvania, are serious and need to be addressed.

But in covering this topic, the AP conflated two different elements of investigative work: open-sourced Internet searches and undercover officers. “Investigators have been infiltrating Muslim student groups at Brooklyn College and other schools in the city, monitoring their Internet activity and placing undercover agents in their ranks,” reads an October 11 story. “Legal experts say the operation may have broken a 19-year-old pact with the colleges and violated U.S. privacy laws, jeopardizing millions of dollars in federal research money and student aid.” This is a dramatic misinterpretation of the nature and scope of the department’s actions.

The first investigative initiative involving students began in 2006 and involved the NYPD Intelligence Division’s Cyber Unit. Officers reviewed Muslim Student Association (MSA) websites, all of which were publicly available, for a period of six months—and with good reason.

Consider the following stories from Great Britain: On March 30, 2004, British authorities disrupted an al-Qaeda plot to mount a bomb attack in the United Kingdom. The individuals involved had obtained 1,300 pounds of ammonium nitrate fertilizer for making bombs. They considered targeting a shopping mall, a nightclub, the U.K.’s 4,200-mile network of underground high-pressure gas pipelines, various British synagogues, Parliament, and a soccer stadium. Four of the seven conspirators were either current university students, dropouts, or graduates of London Metropolitan University, the University of Hertfordshire, and Brunel University. One was an active member of the latter’s Islamic society.

The 2005 London subway plot killed 52 commuters, injured 700, and severe disrupted the city’s transport infrastructure. One of the suicide bombers was a recent graduate of Leeds Metropolitan University, one a recent dropout from the same university, and one a university student at Thomas Danby College in Leeds at the time of the attack.

Next summer, on August 9, British authorities disrupted an al-Qaeda conspiracy to detonate liquid explosives on nine transatlantic airliners traveling from the United Kingdom to the United States and Canada. Four of the nine conspirators were either current university students, dropouts, or graduates from London Metropolitan University, City University, Brunel University, and Middlesex University. One had been president of London Metropolitan University’s Islamic Society.

Most important, the trend is not limited to the U.K. Right here in New York, Mohammed Junaid Babar and Syed Fahad Hashmi, who were arrested in connection with the previously referenced 2004 plot in the U.K. and pled guilty to al-Qaeda-related terrorist activities, had been radicalized through the university-based New York branch of al-Muhajiroun, an Islamist student group in Britain to which several of the subway bombers were linked. The group actively recruited at the Muslim Student Associations of Brooklyn College, Queens College, and other universities in New York City. More recently, the NYPD learned that Adis Medunjanin, indicted for his participation in the most serious plot on American soil since 9/11—the 2009 Najibullah Zazi plot to detonate explosives in the New York City subway system—was an active member of the Queens College Muslim Student Association.

So what did the NYPD do about campus radicalization and recruitment? For a six-month period, beginning in November 2006 and ending in May 2007, Intelligence Division detectives conducted public-information Internet searches to determine if radicalization and recruitment to terrorism were occurring on local university campuses and, if so, to what extent.

Detectives visited publicly available websites of universities and colleges in and around New York City, catalogued what they saw, and assembled the information into 23 biweekly reports. (Once again, NYPD members investigating counterterrorism activities are authorized by the Handschu Guidelines to search websites open to the public for the purpose of developing intelligence information to detect or prevent terrorism or other unlawful activities.) They were looking mostly at speakers, conferences, and events held at MSAs that might—even if inadvertently—support terrorism or provide a recruiting venue for extremist Islamist groups.

Fortunately, the vast majority of speakers, conferences, and events held at Muslim Student Associations in the tristate area were nonthreatening in nature, and in May 2007 the initiative was closed. The information from the biweekly reports was not entered into any database.

Nevertheless, not everything going on at universities was benign. Detectives learned that Jesse Curtis Morton, who has just recently pled guilty to “using his position as a leader of Revolution Muslim Internet sites to conspire to solicit murder, make threatening communications, and use the Internet to place others in fear,” according to the Eastern District of Virginia, spoke at Stony Brook University as a leader of the Islamic Thinkers Society. In April 2007, detectives learned that Morton’s co-founder of Revolution Muslim, Yousef al-Khattab, spoke at Brooklyn College’s Islamic Society.

Wholly separate from this initiative is the use of undercover officers in investigations that sometimes involved MSA-related activities. Of course, one could be forgiven for thinking that an investigation involving students from City University of New York on a whitewater-rafting trip was a direct consequence of these open-source Internet searches, given how the AP conflated the two. It was not.

Here is how the AP managed to conflate the discrete phenomena in a February 18 article: “Police talked with local authorities about professors 300 miles (480 kilometers) away in Buffalo and even sent an undercover agent on a whitewater-rafting trip, where he recorded students’ names and noted in police intelligence files how many times they prayed. Detectives trawled Muslim student websites every day and, although professors and students had not been accused of any wrongdoing, their names were recorded in reports prepared for Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly.”

The trip fell under a classic investigative framework after information obtained by the NYPD raised the possibility that an individual or group of individuals were engaged in or planning to engage in unlawful activity.

Much has been made of the benign nature of this particular event where no discussion of terrorism occurred. A post about the trip on New York magazine’s website claims, “What has civil-liberties advocates really worried is just how far the NYPD has stretched the parameters of its domestic espionage program—until now, at least, the official line was that the force only pursued leads about suspected criminal activity. Clearly, that’s no longer the case.”

Such histrionics are hardly warranted. In the subway-bomb-plot trial of Najibullah Zazi and Adis Medunjanin, it was disclosed that operational planning for the plot occurred on the basketball courts of Kissena Park and while hiking on Bear Mountain, north of New York City. Neither a bucolic setting nor a recreational endeavor guarantees peaceful intentions.

The AP also has claimed that these and other investigations have occurred with insufficient oversight. One article uncritically quoted New York Civil Liberties Union lawyer Christopher Dunn, who declared of the NYPD anti-terrorism program: “At the end of the day, it’s pure and simple a rogue domestic surveillance operation.” He continued: “One of the hallmarks of the intelligence division over the last 10 years is that, not only has it gotten extremely aggressive and sophisticated, but it’s operating completely on its own. There are no checks. There is no oversight.”

In particular, the AP has asserted that the modified Handschu Guidelines gave the NYPD operational carte blanche. “He scrapped the old rules and replaced them with more lenient ones,” reads an August 23, 2011, article describing U.S. District Judge Charles S. Haight Jr.’s decision to modify the guidelines in 2002. “It was a turning point for the NYPD.”

But far from providing evidence of this charge, the whitewater-rafting case reveals it as folly. The Handschu Guidelines require written authorization from the deputy commissioner of intelligence when utilizing human intelligence. That requirement was met here as it has been in every other case. Moreover, an internal committee reviews each investigation to ensure compliance, and a legal unit based in the Intelligence Division evaluates every field intelligence report generated through an investigation. This committee meets regularly every month, and at one meeting at the end of my tenure, no fewer than 10 attorneys and five assistant or deputy commissioners were in attendance. It is important to note that investigations are discontinued unless they reasonably indicate that an unlawful act has been, is being, or will be committed.

As a matter of Police Department policy, undercover officers and confidential informants do not enter a mosque unless they are doing so as part of an investigation of a person or institution approved under the Handschu Guidelines. Likewise, when undercover officers or confidential informants have attended a private event organized by a student group, they have done so only on the basis of a lead or investigation reviewed and authorized in writing at the highest levels of the department.

Given my dual role as a former director of intelligence analysis at the NYPD and a visiting lecturer at Columbia University, I took a special interest in this issue and personally reviewed the documents in question to see the number of times that NYPD human sources were present on local campuses in the last five years. The numbers are very small and almost always involved intelligence-collection efforts limited to individuals who were under investigation, not the broader student body.

So, yes, in 2006, given the trends observed both here and overseas, the NYPD thought it prudent to learn more about what was occurring at Muslim Student Associations in the region via open sources, and the six-month initiative generated six months’ worth of public-information reports. The NYPD did not send undercover sources to infiltrate MSAs throughout the northeast. Both the open-source initiative and the few investigations where undercover officers examined the activities of university students as part of an ongoing investigation authorized by Handschu Guidelines have led to a greater understanding of the relationship between terrorism and university organizations and have, as a result, kept New York City safer.

In total, the NYPD has helped to prevent 14 terrorist attacks on New York City and its surrounding areas and permitted exactly zero deadly plots to materialize in the 11 years since 9/11. Its success, based on the math alone, is indisputable. But in a free country, success is not enough. Civil libertarians are correct in asserting that safety at the cost of political freedom would betray the highest American ideals. And the unlawful targeting of New York City’s minorities would constitute nothing less than a cultural and spiritual gutting of the greatest, most diverse city history has seen. But neither of those travesties have occurred, thanks to the genius of America’s Constitution and the NYPD’s exquisite adherence to it.

Sadly, the absence of wrongdoing goes only so far in a media-driven society shaped by the 24-hour news cycle and explosive headlines. The damage the AP inflicted upon the NYPD’s reputation cannot be mitigated wholly by this or any other honest airing of the facts. Indeed, one can argue that inflicting such damage—not debating police methodology—was the point of the AP’s series.

The war on the NYPD’s method of combating terrorism is a war on the war on terror by proxy—an effort to portray the least controversial aspect of homeland security as instead a matter of great civil-libertarian concern. Long before the AP series, the war on the war began with efforts to discredit the federal government’s endeavors to collect intelligence from combatants and terror suspects captured on the battlefields of Afghanistan and Iraq. It zoomed in on the rights of those detained overseas and at the American base in Guantánamo Bay. Now it has come home, to take on a once universally heralded and supported effort at domestic counterterrorism at the epicenter of the 9/11 attacks, New York City.

Having impugned military and intelligence efforts to fight terrorism, these foes are now taking aim at the most conventional kind of anti-terror approach—one that works within the domestic criminal-justice system, is overseen by courts, and is being managed by a police department that has rigorously kept to the terms of legal limits to which it agreed nearly 30 years ago.

By portraying the NYPD efforts as rogue operations, the AP and the Pulitzer committee are seeking to slacken attempts inside the United States to stop terrorist plots before they happen. Letting these false and misleading stories alter local counterterrorism work would be catastrophic. It has taken many hard years to craft the effective anti-terrorism policies that serve us so well today. Now, with al-Qaeda on the ropes, our renewed sense of security can morph easily into complacency—and terrorists will be sure to exploit any new opportunities to attack. The price of maintaining the safety of New Yorkers has been kept remarkably low, not only for residents but for the country as a whole. Preventing another devastating attack from occurring in the city after 2001 was much more than a local necessity. Such an attack would have been devastating to national morale.

And it still would be.

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Must-Reads from Magazine

Chicago, Illinois — Andy has little time to chitchat. There are hundreds of hot towels to sort and fold, and when that’s done, there are yet more to wash and dry. The 41-year-old is one of half a dozen laundry-room workers at Misericordia, a community for people with disabilities in the Windy City. He and his colleagues, all of whom are intellectually disabled and reside on the Misericordia “campus,” know that their work has purpose, and they delight in each task and every busy hour.

In addition to his job at the laundry room, Andy holds two others. “For two days I work at Sacred Heart”—a nearby Catholic school—“and at Target. Target is a store, a big super-store. At Sacred Heart, I sweep floors and tables.”

“Ah, so you’re the janitor there?” I follow up.

“No, no! I just clean. I love working there.”

Andy’s packed schedule is typical for the higher-functioning residents at Misericordia, many of whom juggle multiple jobs. Their work at Misericordia helps meet real community needs—laundry, recycling, gardening, cooking, baking, and so on—while preparing residents for the private labor market. Andy has already found competitive employment (at Target), but many others rely on Misericordia’s own programs to stay active and employed.

Yet if progressive lawmakers and minimum-wage crusaders have their way, many of these opportunities would disappear, along with the Depression-era law which makes them possible.

The law, Section 14(c) of the Fair Labor Standards Act, permits employers to pay people with disabilities a specialized wage based on their ability to perform various jobs. It thus encourages the hiring of the disabled while ensuring that they are paid a wage commensurate with their productivity. The law safeguards against abuse by, among other things, requiring employers to regularly review and adjust wages as disabled employees make productivity gains. Many of these employers are nonprofit entities that exist solely to provide meaningful work for the disabled.

Only 20 percent of Americans with disabilities participate in the labor force. The share is even smaller among those with intellectual and developmental disabilities. For this group, work isn’t mainly about money—most of the Misericordia residents are oblivious to how much they get paid—so much as it is about purpose and community. What the disabled seek from work is “the feeling of safety, the opportunity to work alongside friends, and an atmosphere of kindness and understanding,” says Scott Mendel, chairman of Together for Choice, which campaigns for freedom of choice for the disabled and their families. (Mendel’s daughter, who has cerebral palsy, lives and works at Misericordia.)

Abstract principles of economic justice, divorced from economic realities and the lived experience of people with disabilities, are a recipe for disaster in this area. Yet that’s the approach taken by too many progressives these days.

Last month, for example, seven Senate progressives led by Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts wrote a letter to Labor Secretary Alexander Acosta denouncing Section 14(c) for setting “low expectations for workers with disabilities” and relegating them to “second-class” status. The senators also took issue with so-called sheltered workshops, like those at Misericordia, which are specifically designed to help the disabled find pathways to market employment. Activists at the state level, meanwhile, continue to press for the abolition of such programs, and they have already succeeded in restricting or limiting them in a number of jurisdictions, most notably in Pennsylvania, where such settings have been all but eliminated.

While there have been a few, notorious cases of 14(c) and sheltered-workshop abuse over the years, existing law provides mechanisms for punishing firms for misconduct. Getting rid of 14(c) and sheltered workshops, however, could potentially leave hundreds of thousands of disabled people unemployed. Activists have yet to explain what it is they expect these newly jobless to do with their time.

Competitive employment simply isn’t an option for many of the most disabled. And even those like Andy, who are employed in the private economy, tend to work at most 20 hours a week at their competitive jobs. What would they do with the rest of their time, if sheltered workshops didn’t exist? Most likely, they would “veg out” in front of a television. Squeezing 14(c) program and forcing private employers to pay minimum wage to workers whose productivity falls far short of the norm wouldn’t improve the lot of the disabled; it would leave them jobless.

Economic reality is reality no less for the disabled.

Nor have progressives accounted for the effects on the lives of the disabled in jurisdictions that have restricted sheltered workshops. “None of these states have done an adequate job of ascertaining whether these actions actually enhanced the quality of life for the individuals affected,” a study in the Social Improvement Journal concluded last year. Less time in sheltered workshops, the study found, “was not replaced with a corollary increase in the use of more integrated forms of employment.” Rather, “these individuals were essentially unemployed, engaging in made-up day activities.”

Make-work is not what Andy and his colleagues are up to today at Misericordia. They complete real tasks, which benefit their fellow residents in concrete ways. “This work is training, but it also gives them meaning,” one Misericordia director told me. “It’s not just doing meaningless work, but it’s going toward something. We’re not setting them up to do something that someone else takes apart. This is something that’s needed.” Yet, in the name of economic justice, progressives are on the verge of depriving men and women like Andy of the dignity of work and the freedom of choice that non-disabled Americans take for granted.

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To paraphrase New York Times columnist Ross Douthat (with apologies), the less Republicans do in office, the more popular they generally become. That is, when the GOP exists solely in voters’ minds as a bulwark against cultural and political liberalism, it can cobble together a winning coalition. Likewise, Democrats regain the national trust when they serve only as an obstacle to Republican objectives. It’s when both parties begin to talk about what they want to do with their power that they get into trouble.

That is an over-simplification, but the core thesis is an astute one. In an age of negative partisanship and without an acute foreign or domestic crisis to focus the national mind, it’s not unreasonable to presume that both parties’ chief value is defined in negative terms by the public. Considering how little of the national dialogue has to do with policy these days, general principles and heuristics are probably how most marginal voters navigate the political environment.

Somewhere along the way, though, Democrats managed to convince themselves that they cannot just be the anti-Donald Trump party. Their most influential members have become convinced that the party needs to articulate a positive agenda beyond a set of vague principles. For the moment, Democrats who merely want to present themselves as unobjectionable alternatives to Trumpism without going into much broader detail appear to be losing the argument.

According to a study of campaign-season advertisements released on Friday by the USA Today Network and conducted by Kantar Media’s Campaign Marketing Analysis Group, Democrats are not leaning into their opposition to Trump. While over 44,000 pro-Trump advertisements from Republican candidates have aired on local broadcast networks, only about 20,000 Democratic ads have highlighted a candidate’s anti-Trump bona fides. “Trump has been mentioned in 27 [percent] of Democratic ads for Congress, overwhelmingly in a negative light,” the study revealed. In the same period during the 2014 midterm election cycle, by contrast, 60 percent of Republican advertisements featured President Barack Obama in a negative light.

There are plenty of caveats that should prevent observers from drawing too many broad conclusions about what this means. First, comparing the political environment in 2018 to 2014 is apples and oranges. Recall that 2014 was Barack Obama’s second midterm election, so naturally enthusiasm among the incumbent party’s base to rally to the president’s defense wanes while the “out-party’s” anxiety over the incumbent president grows. If Donald Trump’s job-approval rating is still anemic in September, it is reasonable to expect that Republican candidates will soft-peddle their support for the president just as Democrats did in 2010. Second, Democrats running against Democrats in a Democratic primary race may not feel the need to emphasize their opposition to the president, since that doesn’t create a stark enough contrast with their opponent.

And yet, the net effect of the primary season is the same. Democrats aren’t just informing voters of their opposition to how Trump and the Republican Party have managed the nation’s affairs; they’re describing what they would do differently. By and large, the Democratic Party’s agenda consists of “doubling” spending on social-welfare programs, education, and infrastructure, and promising a series of five-year-plan prestige projects. But Democratic candidates are also leaning heavily into divisive social issues.

The themes that Democratic ads have embraced so far range from support for new gun-control measures (“f*** the NRA,” was one New Mexico candidate’s message), to protecting public funding for Planned Parenthood, to promoting support for same-sex marriage rights, to attacking Sinclair Broadcasting (which happened to own the network on which that particular ad ran). A number of Democratic candidates are running on their support for a single-payer health-care system, including the progressive candidate in Nebraska’s GOP-leaning 2nd Congressional District who narrowly defeated an establishment-backed former House member this week, putting that seat farther out of the reach of Democrats in November.

In the end, messages like these animate the Democratic Party’s progressive base, but they have the potential to alienate swing voters. That may not be enough to overcome the electorate’s tendency to reward the “out-party” in a president’s first midterm election. And yet, the risk Democrats run by being specific about what they actually want to do with renewed political power cannot be dismissed. Democrats in the activist base are convinced that embracing conflict-ridden identity politics is a moral imperative, and the party’s establishmentarian leaders appear to believe that being anti-Trump is not enough to ensure the party’s success in November. All the while, the Democratic Party’s position in the polls continues to deteriorate.

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A running theme in Jonah Goldberg’s fantastic new book, Suicide of the West, is the extent to which those who were bequeathed the blessings associated with classically liberal capitalist models of governance are cursed with crippling insecurity. Western economic and political advancement has followed a consistently upward trajectory, albeit in fits and starts. Yet, the chief beneficiaries of this unprecedented prosperity seem unaware of that fact. In boom or bust, the verdict of many in the prosperous West remains the same: the capitalist model is flawed and failing.

Capitalism’s detractors are as likely to denounce the exploitative nature of free markets during a downturn as they are to lament the displacement and disorientation that follows when the economy roars. The bottom line is static; only the emphasis changes. Though this tendency is a bipartisan one, capitalism’s skeptics are still more at home on the left. With the lingering effects of the Great Recession all but behind us, the liberal argument against capitalism’s excesses has shifted from mitigating the effects on low-skilled workers to warnings about the pernicious effects of prosperity.

Matthew Stewart’s expansive piece in The Atlantic this month is a valuable addition to the genre. In it, Stewart attacks the rise of a permanent aristocracy resulting from the plague of “income inequality,” but his argument is not a recitation of the Democratic Party’s 2012 election themes. It isn’t just the mythic “1 percent,” (or, in the author’s estimation, the “top 0.1 percent”) but the top 9.9 percent that has not only accrued unearned benefits from capitalist society but has fixed the system to ensure that those benefits are hereditary.

Stewart laments the rise of a new Gilded Age in America, which is anecdotally exemplified by his own comfort and prosperity—a spoil he appears to view as plunder stolen from the blue-collar service providers he regularly patronizes. You see, he is a member of a new aristocracy, which leverages its economic and social capital to wall itself off from the rest of the world and preserves its influence. He and those like him have “mastered the old trick of consolidating wealth and passing privilege along at the expense of other people’s children.” This corruption and Stewart’s insecurity is, he contends, a product of consumerism. “The traditional story of economic growth in America has been one of arriving, building, inviting friends, and building some more,” Stewart wrote. “The story we’re writing looks more like one of slamming doors shut behind us and slowly suffocating under a mass of commercial-grade kitchen appliances.”

Though he diverges from the kind of scientistic Marxism reanimated by Thomas Piketty, Stewart nevertheless appeals to some familiar Soviet-style dialectical materialism. “Inequality necessarily entrenches itself through other, nonfinancial, intrinsically invidious forms of wealth and power,” he wrote. “We use these other forms of capital to project our advantages into life itself.” In this way, Stewart can have it all. The privilege enjoyed by the aristocracy is a symptom of Western capitalism’s sickness, but so, too, are the advantages bestowed on the underprivileged. Affirmative action programs in schools, for example, function in part to “indulge rich people in the belief that their college is open to all on the basis of merit.”

It goes on like this for another 13,000 words and, thus, has the strategic advantage of being impervious to a comprehensive rebuttal outside of a book. Stewart does make some valuable observations about entrenched interests, noxious rent-seekers, and the perils of empowering the state to pick economic winners and losers. Where his argument runs aground is his claim that meritocracy in America is an illusion. Capitalism is, he says, a brutal zero-sum game in which true advancement is rendered unattainable by unseen forces is a foundational plank of the liberal American ethos. This is not new. Not new at all.

Much of Stewart’s thesis can be found in a 2004 report in The Economist, which alleges that the American upper-middle-class has created a set of “sticky” conditions that preserve their status and result in what Teddy Roosevelt warned could become an American version of a “hereditary aristocracy.” In 2013, the American economist Joseph Stiglitz warned that the American dream is dead, and the notion that the United States is a place of opportunity is a myth. “Since capitalism required losers, the myth of the melting pot was necessary to promote the belief in individual mobility through hard work and competition,” read a line from a 1973 edition of a National Council for the Social Studies-issued handbook for teachers. The Southern Poverty Law Center, which for some reason produces a curriculum for teachers, has long recommended that educators advise students poverty is a result of systemic factors and not individual choices. Even today, a cottage industry has arisen around the notion that Western largess is decadence, that meritocracy is a myth, and that arguments to the contrary are acts of subversion.

The belief that American meritocracy is a myth persists despite wildly dynamic conditions on the ground. As the Brookings Institution noted, 60 percent of employed black women in 1940 worked as household servants, compared with just 2.2 percent today. In between 1940 and 1970, “black men cut the income gap by about a third,” wrote Abigail and Stephan Thernstrom in 1998. The black professional class, ranging from doctors to university lecturers, exploded in the latter half of the 20th Century, as did African-American home ownership and life expectancy rates. The African-American story is not unique. The average American income in 1990 was just $23,730 annually. Today, it’s $58,700—a figure that well outpaces inflation and that outstrips most of the developed world. The American middle-class is doing just fine, but that experience has not come at the expense of Americans at or near the poverty line. As the economic recovery began to take hold in 2014, poverty rates declined precipitously across the board, though that effect was more keenly felt by minority groups which recovered at faster rates than their white counterparts.

As National Review’s Max Bloom pointed out last year, 13 of the world’s top 25 universities and 21 of the world’s 50 largest universities are located in America. The United States attracts substantial foreign investment, inflating America’s much-misunderstood trade deficit. The influx of foreign immigrants and legal permanent residents streaming into America looking to take advantage of its meritocratic system rivals or exceeds immigration rates at the turn of the 20th Century. You could be forgiven for concluding that American meritocracy is self-evident to all who have not been informed of the general liberal consensus. Indeed, according to an October 2016 essay in The Atlantic by Victor Tan Chen, the United States so “fetishizes” meritocracy that it has become “exhausting” and ultimately “harmful” to its “egalitarian ideals.”

Stewart is not wrong that there has been a notable decline in economic mobility in this decade. That condition is attributable to many factors, ranging from the collapse of the mortgage market to the erosion of the nuclear family among lower-to middle-class Americans (a charge supported by none-too-conservative venues like the New York Times and the Brookings Institution). But Mr. Stewart will surely rejoice in the discovery that downward economic mobility is alive and well among the upper class. National Review’s Kevin Williamson observed in March of this year that the Forbes billionaires list includes remarkably few heirs to old money. “According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, inherited wealth accounts for about 15 percent of the assets of the wealthiest Americans,” he wrote. Moreover, that list is not static; it churns, and that churn is reflective of America’s economic dynamism. In 2017, for example, “hedge fund managers have been displaced over the last two years not only by technology billionaires but by a fish stick king, meat processor, vodka distiller, ice tea brewer and hair care products peddler.”

There is plenty to be said in favor of America’s efforts to achieve meritocracy, imperfect as those efforts may be. But so few seem to be touting them, preferring instead to peddle the idea that the ideal of success in America is a hollow simulacrum designed to fool its citizens into toiling toward no discernable end. Stewart’s piece is a fine addition to a saturated marketplace in which consumers are desperate to reward purveyors of bad news. Here’s to his success.

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We try, we really do try, to sort through the increasingly problematic “Russian collusion” narrative and establish a timeline of sorts—and figure out what’s real and what’s nonsense. Do we succeed? Give a listen.

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On July 4, 1863, Rabbi Sabato Morais of Philadelphia’s Mikveh Israel congregation ascended the pulpit to deliver the Sabbath sermon. Those assembled in the synagogue knew that over the previous few days, Union and Confederate forces had been engaged in an epic engagement at Gettysburg, but they had no idea who had won or whether Confederate forces would continue onward to Washington or Philadelphia. That year, July 4 coincided with the 17th of Tammuz, when Jews commemorate the Roman breach of the walls of Jerusalem. Morais prayed that God not allow Jerusalem’s fate to befall the American capital and assured his audience that he had not forgotten the joyous date on which he spoke: “I am not indifferent, my dear friends, to the event, which, four score and seven years ago, brought to this new world light and joy.”

An immigrant from Italy, Morais had taught himself English utilizing the King James Bible. Few Americans spoke in this manner, including Abraham Lincoln. Three days later, the president himself reflected before an audience: “How long ago is it?—eighty-odd years—since on the Fourth of July for the first time in the history of the world a nation by its representatives assembled and declared as a self-evident truth that ‘all men are created equal.’” Only several months later, at the dedication of the Gettysburg cemetery, would Lincoln refer to the birth of our nation in Morais’s manner, making “four score and seven years ago” one of the most famous phrases in the English language and thereby endowing his address with a prophetic tenor and scriptural quality.

This has led historians, including Jonathan Sarna and Marc Saperstein, to suggest that Lincoln may have read Morais’s sermon, which had been widely circulated. Whether or not this was so, the Gettysburg address parallels Morais’s remarks in that it, too, joins mourning for the fallen with a recognition of American independence, allowing those who had died to define our appreciation for the day that our “forefathers brought forth a new nation conceived in liberty.” Lincoln’s words stressed that a nation must always link civic celebration of its independence with the lives given on its behalf. Visiting the cemetery at Gettysburg, he argued, requires us to dedicate ourselves to the unfinished work that “they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced.” He went on: “From these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion,” thereby ensuring that “these dead shall not have died in vain.”

The literary link between Morais’s recalling of Jerusalem and Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address makes it all the more striking that it is the Jews of today’s Judea who make manifest the lessons of Lincoln’s words. Just as the battle of Gettysburg concluded on July 3, Israelis hold their Memorial Day commemorations on the day before their Independence Day celebrations.On the morning of the Fourth of Iyar, a siren sounds throughout the land, with all pausing their everyday activities in reverent memory of those who had died. There are few more stunning images of Israel today than those of highways on which thousands of cars grind to a halt, all travelers standing at the roadside, and all heads bowing in commemoration. Throughout the day, cemeteries are visited by the family members of those lost. Only in the evening does the somber Yom Hazikaron give way to the joy of the Fifth of Iyar’s Yom Ha’atzmaut, Independence Day.For anyone who has experienced it, the two days define each other. Those assembled in Israel’s cemeteries facing the unbearable loss of loved ones do so in the knowledge that it is the sacrifice of their beloved family members that make the next day’s celebration of independence possible. And the celebration of independence is begun with the acknowledgement by millions of citizens that those who lie in those cemeteries, who gave “their last full measure of devotion,” obligate the living to ensure that the dead did not die in vain.

The American version of Memorial Day, like the Gettysburg Address itself, began as a means of decorating and honoring the graves of Civil War dead. It is unconnected to the Fourth of July, which takes place five weeks later. Both holidays are observed by many (though not all) Americans as escapes from work, and too few ponder the link between the sacrifice of American dead and the freedom that we the living enjoy. There is thus no denying that the Israelis’ insistence on linking their Independence Day celebration with their Memorial Day is not only more appropriate; it is more American, a truer fulfillment of Lincoln’s message at Gettysburg.

In studying the Hebrew calendar of 1776, I was struck by the fact that the original Fourth of July, like that of 1863, fell on the 17th of Tammuz. It is, perhaps, another reminder that Gettysburg and America’s birth must always be joined in our minds, and linked in our civic observance. It is, of course, beyond unlikely that Memorial Day will be moved to adjoin the fourth of July. Yet that should not prevent us from learning from the Israeli example. Imagine if the third of July were dedicated to remembering the battle that concluded on that date.Imagine if “Gettysburg Day” involved a brief moment of commemoration by “us, the living” for those who gave the last full measure of devotion.Imagine if tens—perhaps hundreds—of millions of Americans paused in unison from their leisure activities for a minute or two to reflect on the sacrifice of generations past. Surely our observance of the Independence Day that followed could not fail to be affected; surely the Fourth of July would be marked in a manner more worthy of a great nation.

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